This poetry blog post is on moving from not “getting” poetry to loving it. David talks about his experience in a Chaplain Residency Program and reading and writing poetry.
I have a guest come and post on my blog each month talking about poetry so be sure to check out all the Exploring Poetry posts in the series and follow for more! Today I welcome David!
David Stippick is a writer living in Central Texas with his family of five + 2 pets.
David Stippick – A Poetic Journey
Poetry often says what I can’t.
Or don’t know how to.
Or don’t want to.
Or don’t even know if I need to.
Like many people, I had Poetry units in my English/Language Arts classes in school, and I remember two things from them. The poets were famous, well-known, and old (at least, I don’t recall a teacher ever telling us about a poet who was, you know, living and working). I also remember that it made me feel very stupid. I didn’t get it. I was pretty sure poetry was primarily supposed to rhyme, but everything we read didn’t always rhyme. This was my base level of understanding of poetry, and my assignments that involved writing any poetry reflected this…not in a good way.
As a result, I spent over 20 years ignoring poetry. I didn’t get it? I didn’t need to. It wasn’t for me. Thankfully, it didn’t come up much.
I may have had one interaction with it in my Undergraduate days, but I waited to go to college, and after that, I didn’t have any cause to engage with poetry. Quite frankly, as an avid reader, I was really curious about how there was still a market for it. I wasn’t familiar with any modern poets, so how popular could it really be?
Fast-forward a few years, and I found myself in a Residency program training to be a Chaplain. Throughout the program, we had Seminars on various topics relevant to our development as Chaplains. In the Spring of 2022, we would begin a unit on the Arts in Healthcare Chaplaincy. There were undoubtedly several aspects to this, but one of the focuses was, you guessed it, poetry. I was less than excited.
This shit again?
Surely, there were better ways to help people on their healing journeys. Never mind that the inner work I’d done up to this point had me crying for two hours while watching a Cast Reunion special for a movie franchise I had loved as a teen. So, I took it with a grain of salt, but one of the essential factors in this program was being all in on issues you were skeptical about and examining where that was coming from.
Over the next few months, I saw the beauty of the world of ancient, classical, and modern poetry because I was approaching this experience and most things in my life at that point with more openness than before. I ended up with several poetry books I could carry around to use in Patient and staff interactions, and I was excited when the opportunity arose.
On one occasion, I was able to write a poem for a patient’s family. He had been admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 and spent about a month in the ICU before moving to the unit I worked on. I met and spent time with him and his wife three times in his 19 days before moving back down to the ICU when his condition worsened again. Those initial interactions were brief, but when someone you love is unresponsive in a critical care unit, life becomes long and slow – when the Chaplain stops by, you may be a little more inclined to chat than you were before. For three more visits, this patient’s partner told me more about him and their life together than I thought possible. When it became clear that he would not wake up, recover, or go home, I got a nudge to write a poem. I hadn’t written any poetry in probably 20 years, but I’d been learning, listening, and reading more of it in the few short weeks leading up to this than I probably had in the last 20 years. I took the information I’d gotten from conversations and wrote a short poem for his family if they wanted. When I gave it to his wife, she read it and began to cry. She hung it on a wall in the room. When one of their children visited a few days later, she tracked me down so we could all read it together. This was the first moment I saw that my poetry could have any kind of impact on others on top of the effect it had been having on me!
I don’t know where I’d be today if poetry hadn’t been reintroduced to me such a short time ago. I regularly read poetry for enjoyment, embodiment, and soothing. I intermittently dabble in writing some. In the grief book club I run, we rotate a nonfiction book, a fiction book, and a poetry book/collection. I find people enjoy the poetry for the same reason I stated at the beginning:
Poetry often says what I can’t.
Or don’t know how to.
Or don’t want to.
Or don’t even know if I need to.
I’m thankful to the poets past, present, and future who are giving words to experiences and feelings for the rest of us.
Thank you, David! One of my goals with releasing Imaginari was to encourage people to create and to not think that poetry is complex or difficult. What about you readers – have you turned from not liking or feeling like you don’t understand poetry to now embracing it?